Tag: distributed systems

I had meant to update on how my plans for the year were going around June / July so this is a little late, but I have been pretty busy getting the upcoming Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) – Security as a Service (SecaaS) guidance documents. These are due for publication at the start of September – watch this space.. It has also taken longer than expected to finalise my Masters project choice, but I think I’ve got there with that one, finally!

The plan is to cover the current state of distributed systems authentication and to assess how this could be improved by adding further ‘factors’ to the required authentication. In this instance factors refer to things like ‘something you know’ such as passwords, ‘something you have’ such as a number generating token, and something you are such as your finger print. I have completed a project plan outlining how I’ll use the time between now and the hand in date in January 2013, and I’ll keep you posted with progress.

2. Lead / co-chair the CSA SecaaS working group. While it has been challenging to find the time and keep everyone involved working in the same direction, we are almost ready to release the next piece of work from this research group. The next publication will be in the form of 10 implementation guidance documents covering the 10 SecaaS categories we defined last year. These will be released on the CSA web site around the end of August, I’ll post a link once they are available. This has certainly been a learning experience regarding managing the output of a very very diverse set of international volunteers!

3. Become more familiar with the Xen hypervisor. I have had limited success with this one, increasing my familiarity with virtualisation and cloud generally, and reading up on Xen. However I have not had a chance to set up a test environment running the open source Xen hypervisor to get properly acquainted with it. I’ll be looking to rectify this during October, at which time I’ll provide a run down of my thoughts of this hypervisor’s features and how easy it is to install and configure.

4. Brush up my scripting and secure coding. Scripting opportunities have been limited this year, and I have not had the tine to create side projects outside of the office due to CSA and Masters related work. Secure coding, I have reviewed both some code and some development practices against OWASP recommendations and the Microsoft secure development lifecycle (SDLC), so have made some progress in this area and will follow with an update in a future post.

Overall, not as much progress in some areas as I had hoped, but I am reasonably happy with the CSA SecaaS and Master progress, while also holding my own in full time employment.

As mentioned, keep an eye out for the upcoming publication of the SecaaS implementation guidance!

Checked today and I have passed the final module – Secure Systems Programming. I actually did considerably better than I expected and as I had virtually no C/C++ experience prior to this module I’m very pleased!

Nice to make some progress on the first item from my post about plans for the year as well..

Just the project to go, so I’ll definitely complete the Masters this year. I will post some updates on the project later in the year as that gets started and progresses from around April time.

So I am currently working on what my MSc project should cover. As the overall title of the MSc is Distributed Systems and Networks the project should likely incorporate some sort of networked / distributed system. Given my continued interest in IT Security and the fact one of my favourite modules was actually titled ‘Distributed Systems Security’ I’d also like to incorporate a strong security focus into the project as well.
As I am also working on some cloud security related work for the Cloud Security Alliance I am thinking something ‘cloud’ related would be good as this would bring together aspects of security, obviously distributed systems along with being a very current topic.
The purpose of this post is to garner ideas and suggestions for project content and/or possible titles as I am struggling a little to decide the best and most interesting / useful option. Likely especially relevant to the guys I am working with on CSA projects, but obviously open to anyone – what areas would you like to see further research in, where could my MSc project and value and insight?
Please feel free to post here or email me with any ideas and suggestions. Many of you have my email, however if you need it; it’s on my LinkedIn profile. I’ll keep this blog updated with my topic decision and also link to the project once it is complete.
Thanks for your interest – looks like this is going to be an interesting and busy year!
K